Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, has published on his blog an interesting status report for Python 3.0 ('Python 3000'), the upcoming major revision to the language scheduled for mid-2008. He discusses the rationale for redesigning the language, syntax changes, new features and libraries and inter-compatibility issues.

Do you think it's a practical problem or is it just that you don't like it?

Whilst I like python and use it a lot both at home and at work, I have definitely had problems resulting from this. The trouble is that as soon as the indentation is damaged, either by someone using an editor that is configured to use hard tabs or by copying code to another place (eg. to move it into a function) then the semantics of the code are destroyed. I can live with this, but I think the people who are claim 'there is no problem' are just burying their heads in the sand.

The trouble is that as soon as the indentation is damaged, either by someone using an editor that is configured to use hard tabs or by copying code to another place (eg. to move it into a function)

Yes, those might be problems. An editor that isn't python-aware, can mess things up for you, so that is something to watch out for. I haven't really seen those problems myself, but it might be a bigger issue than I realize.

Copy-paste bugs, I have had. Unittesting catches almost all of those for me. Even if there was no risk of error in copy-paste, I'd still not feel comfortable about code that didn't go through unittesting, so for me that's not additional work.

Yes, there are situations where those are real problems. But there are also ways to avoid most of those situations.